Snor City to Cool Capital: architect transforms Pretoria with guerilla art

Pretoria architect Pieter Mathews was recently awarded the storied Medal of Honour for Visual Arts (Architecture) by the Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns (The South African Academy for Science and Arts).

While some of SA's most famous artists have received it over its 109-year history - from Jacobus Hendrik Pierneef, Anton Van Wouw, Alexis Preller and Irma Stern to the contemporary likes of William Kentridge, Willie Bester and Diane Victor - and a handful of architects, Mathews is recognised as much for his unconventional work at the intersection of art and architecture as for buildings and urbanism.

Even more radical in its understanding of this terrain is Mathews's role as the convenor of Cool Capital, the design festival he billed as the world's first "uncurated DIY guerrilla biennale", started in 2014.

Basically, without a budget or seeking permission or allowing himself to be cynical about people's willingness to engage with their urban environments, he convened a modest citizen-led biennale to democratise design, placing the initiative for improving the city in the hands of its citizens. At the same time, he hoped he might free Pretoria from its image as the conservative "Dorpstad" or "Snor City".

Essentially, Cool Capital was a gently anarchic act of granting the city's creative community permission to care about their urban environment, to make their own interventions and re-appropriate it as a creative centre.

The result was anything but modest - it exploded. Hundreds of interventions popped up throughout the city, the ripples taking Pretoria to the Venice Biennale, with Mathews as curator of the 2016 South African Pavilion, presenting Cool Capital for that year's theme, "Reporting from the Front".

The pavilion in turn was featured in the pages of Wallpaper* magazine and listed among the 12 best pavilions at the biennale by the Venice Insider.

While taking us on a site tour of his work on the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria, which is currently under construction and when complete will include a gallery to rival the likes of the Norval Centre in Cape Town, Mathews's conversation turned to perceptions of Pretoria's artistic legacy. He made reference to an article in the pages of this newspaper earlier this month about Pretoria's installation of 100 bronze statues at Groenkloof Nature Reserve, The Long March To Freedom.

The article refers to the city's ongoing reflex, though regime after regime, of casting its fantasies of the past in monumental bronze sculptures, with the taint of self-legitimising nationalism running through them all.

"There's another side of Pretoria and the bronze issue," Mathews says. As part of Cool Capital's high school arts project a few years ago, he says, students and teachers at Pretoria High School for Girls teamed up with artist Diane Victor to stage a pop-up artistic intervention at the Groenkloof sculpture park that involved blindfolding the bronze statues of struggle leaders.

On one level, this was a symbolic act: a new generation protecting the heroes of the past from a disappointing present. On another, it was an expression of optimism symbolising the metaphorical blindness of faith and hope. However you choose to see it, it showed that young citizens of the city weren't reading the bronze according to its intended script.

Before that, also as part of Cool Capital, Anton van Wouw's monumental bronze of Paul Kruger in Church Square was entirely covered in tin foil in another intervention by a group calling themselves "r1.". It was one of a series of guerrilla interventions interrogating the city's relationship with the monuments of its past.

The Pretoria Institute of Architecture even managed to light up Gerard Moerdyk's Voortrekker Monument in pink for the duration of the biennale. There were countless other small interventions, from yarn and fabric bombing to guerrilla gardening.

These interventions attempted to reframe the monuments of the past, interrogate them in a new light and reinterpret them for a new era. Their temporary or renewable nature suggests an ongoing process of re-examining the past, acknowledging and engaging with it rather than effacing history and reinventing it in the image of a new fantasy.

Mathews's preference for guerrilla tactics and a democratic cacophony of voices doesn't mean he's anti Pretoria's habit of casting bronze whenever it can. Rather, he's a proponent of the idea that more is more. Rather than pursue good taste or a single message, he says simply, "the more bronzes the better. We want the small, ugly, big. If there's debate, bring it on."

Mathews's Akademie medal of honour acknowledges the more provisional aspects of the city's relationship with its past and its artistic and architectural heritage. But what he does is create temporary manifestations of the city's perception of itself. Through these flickerings - blindfolds, foil, pink lights - monuments past and present are reframed. To read the monuments straight is to get only half the story.